This morning, in a press release, we learn that the PCIe 6.0, reaches the version 0.9. Roughly speaking, it is the last step before the official version of this standard. If all this holds, we should you this last arrive in 2023!
PCIe 6.0: we reach the version 0.9, only one step before the launch!
If you have been following the case, from one revision to another of PCIe, the bandwidth doubles. That’s why we went from 32 GB/s (PCIe 3.0) to 64 GB/s with PCIe 4.0. Here, Alder Lake-S will bring the 5.0 standard as well as a bandwidth of 128 GB/s in a 16-line connector.
There, if everything goes well, in 2023 (taking what was said here), the bandwidth of the standard should double again. One would pass thus to 256 Go/s thanks to the improvements brought. One thinks in particular of the use of the PAM-4 encoding allowing the sending of the double of data by cycle of clock compared to the PCIe 5.0. The other addition concerns the integration of the FEC, an error correction system allowing to preserve the integrity of the data.
In short, at this time, hardware manufacturers will be able to start implementing the standard in their hardware. The goal is to ensure that it (the hardware) is compatible with the announced features. In addition, this version 6.0 should ensure backward compatibility with older versions of PCIe.
Finally, the specs of this 6.0 standard should not be finalized before the beginning of next year. A small delay compared to the initial plan to finalize them by the end of the year.
